This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margins until your business is no longer viable, or simply make your business impossible because of indifference to your requirements.
That the service may be unreliable and it's one more point of failure is just one of the reasons why it's a bad idea to depend on FB (or Twitter, or G+ login) for your logins, and this is why their attempt to subsume the web with corporate corrals will ultimately fail.
I agree with you in principle, however you are ignoring the business value the external auth provides. Specifically there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email, but will login with Facebook.
If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management, but you allow third-party authentication that ties into that account, especially allowing multiple OAuth providers to be linked to a single of your internal accounts (eg. see how Stack Overflow works), you can significantly mitigate the downside.
The purist and old-school web head and open standards guy in me hates it, but you can't argue with the business case for it.
Facebook deleted my personal account and disabled all my fb API keys for releasing an app for Instagram that they claim violates the Instagram tos. The app has nothing to do with Facebook. This was done with no warning.
What are you talking about? Everyone has to depend on some infrastruture to provide their service. I'd imagine pretty much every hosting platform (from amazon to dreamhost) has less reliability than facebook.
Using it for logins is really questionable. But if you are, for example, building a game for Facebook, it gives you many advantages, so occasional downtime is not really the biggest issue. Let's check the things you wrote about in gaming context:
- charging for the service later TRUE (viral is dead, you pay for the ads to get new players in)
- cut you out of a relationship with your own customer - somewhat FALSE (you can request e-mails from your customers, and have a direct contact afterwards). Even with fan pages, they are not cuting you out, but merely asking to pay to get your message to them
- require you to use their store TRUE, but every other platform does the same
- copy your idea and give it for free. FALSE - Facebook never made a game AFAIK
- squezee you margins. TRUE. I do notice that Cost Per Install for my games is getting higher the more I advertize, and that it suddenly jumped from about $0.15 per install to $0.50 per install a few days ago - about the same time when they switched to the new payment user interface.
This is a very interesting event for the world: on a rough estimate, almost half a billion people are displaced right now. Where are all those man-minutes going to, now that facebook is down and they're not facing that iconic blue header bar on their browser?
The downtime will surely end and it'll be back up again for sure, facebook has very smart people behind it, but this event will have served as a very interesting 'accidental' social experiment. Honestly, I'm not that interested on what happened technically, but I'm interested what effect it had socially for the common man outside the techcrunch/HN/reddit/tech bubble.
On-topic: does facebook have a consolidated status page?
What? Displaced? The common man? Reality check, dude.
Nobody is on Facebook constantly. It was down for about 30 minutes, tops. The "common man" just did whatever common men do for all those minutes when they're not on Facebook. Maybe, maybe not, they'll make up the slack later.
Sure, someone was inconvenienced because they relied on being able to find some information or send a message on Facebook and couldn't, but I'll bet far, far more people are inconvenienced on a daily basis in a similar way when their smartphone runs out of battery or is stolen or otherwise lost. Or the network (mobile or fixed line) is down.
I didn't use the word "common man" in an "elitist" context, I used it for avid users, which is a lot of people. Most people inside the tech world underestimate the role of facebook for a person who, all their friends, family and loved ones are using it on a daily basis.
I do agree that a lot of people, if not, everybody will not go crazy or be inconvenienced by a 30-minute downtime, not everyone is on it 24/7. I'm just saying I'm interested on where all those man-minutes went to for avid users.
Probably ringing on their neighbours' door, playing Xbox or having lunch with their family, etc.
Readit News
https://developers.facebook.com/status/
That the service may be unreliable and it's one more point of failure is just one of the reasons why it's a bad idea to depend on FB (or Twitter, or G+ login) for your logins, and this is why their attempt to subsume the web with corporate corrals will ultimately fail.
If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management, but you allow third-party authentication that ties into that account, especially allowing multiple OAuth providers to be linked to a single of your internal accounts (eg. see how Stack Overflow works), you can significantly mitigate the downside.
The purist and old-school web head and open standards guy in me hates it, but you can't argue with the business case for it.
Using it for logins is really questionable. But if you are, for example, building a game for Facebook, it gives you many advantages, so occasional downtime is not really the biggest issue. Let's check the things you wrote about in gaming context:
- charging for the service later TRUE (viral is dead, you pay for the ads to get new players in)
- cut you out of a relationship with your own customer - somewhat FALSE (you can request e-mails from your customers, and have a direct contact afterwards). Even with fan pages, they are not cuting you out, but merely asking to pay to get your message to them
- require you to use their store TRUE, but every other platform does the same
- copy your idea and give it for free. FALSE - Facebook never made a game AFAIK
- squezee you margins. TRUE. I do notice that Cost Per Install for my games is getting higher the more I advertize, and that it suddenly jumped from about $0.15 per install to $0.50 per install a few days ago - about the same time when they switched to the new payment user interface.
OAuth dialogs don't load and the graph API is down too.
Also affects the like buttons across the web, see the error on an old TC article here: http://cl.ly/image/2Q3V1X240D12
No application, desktop or web app, is truly bulletproof.
Dead Comment
The downtime will surely end and it'll be back up again for sure, facebook has very smart people behind it, but this event will have served as a very interesting 'accidental' social experiment. Honestly, I'm not that interested on what happened technically, but I'm interested what effect it had socially for the common man outside the techcrunch/HN/reddit/tech bubble.
On-topic: does facebook have a consolidated status page?
Nobody is on Facebook constantly. It was down for about 30 minutes, tops. The "common man" just did whatever common men do for all those minutes when they're not on Facebook. Maybe, maybe not, they'll make up the slack later.
Sure, someone was inconvenienced because they relied on being able to find some information or send a message on Facebook and couldn't, but I'll bet far, far more people are inconvenienced on a daily basis in a similar way when their smartphone runs out of battery or is stolen or otherwise lost. Or the network (mobile or fixed line) is down.
I do agree that a lot of people, if not, everybody will not go crazy or be inconvenienced by a 30-minute downtime, not everyone is on it 24/7. I'm just saying I'm interested on where all those man-minutes went to for avid users.
Probably ringing on their neighbours' door, playing Xbox or having lunch with their family, etc.
If you mean all code it will be the end of Facebook.
But ofcourse this is never going to happen.
Once you delete something it stays on facebook for like weeks.
They would have to have accidentally blown up everything with a bomb to have the problem you're talking about.